Local Hero.(Symphony in Three Movements)(Dance review)

When the curtain came down on the opening number of Miami City Ballet's season at City Center late last month, the applause fairly rocked the hall. The dancers, taking their bows, were visibly surprised. I thought some of them were going to cry. This reception was not just for the company, or even for the thundering piece it had just performed, Balanchine's "Symphony in Three Movements." Clearly, it was also for M.C.B.'s director, Edward Villella, whom many New Yorkers regard with an old, possessive love. Villella was America's first great homegrown male ballet dancer. That was in the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, before the arrival of the Russians and the Cubans and the Spaniards, who, today, have made male show steps the most clappable thing in ballet. But Villella, at New York City Ballet, executed greater feats. The sautes developpes en arriere (jumping backward while one leg is unfolding forward) that he produced in Balanchine's "Midsummer Night's Dream": no one had ever done such a thing before. (And few have done it correctly since.) Outsiders are always saying that ballet is undemocratic--it's foreign, it's snooty, it's passe. The people who do it are all tall and thin, not like us regular folk. And here was Villella, a short American guy, performing it as no one had ever seen it.

Nor was there anything snooty about his background. He was an Italian-American working-class kid from Queens. The only reason he got into a dance class was that his mother took his sister to the local ballet school, with Eddie tagging along, and the teacher said, How about the little boy, too? Villella's father, who drove a truck in New York's garment district, did not welcome this development. He wanted his son to get ahead in the world, and ballet did not seem to him a likely means to this end. He tolerated the lessons for a while, but once it became clear that Villella actually wanted to dance for a living--by then he had moved to the very serious School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet's affiliate--he insisted that the boy go to college. As a result, Villella had to quit ballet. After four years at SUNY Maritime College--he is no doubt the only ballet dancer in history with a degree in marine transportation--he went right back to ballet class, and he joined City Ballet a year later, in 1957, but, as a result of his interrupted training, he had crippling muscular problems throughout his career.

Still, he was a superlative dancer, and adored by the press, not only for his skill or even his artistry but also for his blue-collar origins and for his extreme, natural virility. The man seemed to be heterosexual, and, in mid-century American ballet, that was news. Balanchine, too, liked Villella's "street" manner, and used it. The section of his 1967 "Rubies" in which the male star, originally Villella, leads four other men in a chase around the stage is probably the butchest ballet number ever made. All this added up, in the public mind, to a symbol of national identity. In America, anyone could be President (or they can now), and an "ethnic" from Queens could become a ballet star.

Because of his physical problems, Villella stopped dancing early. Soon, he was invited to set up a ballet company in Miami. This was a tough assignment. Miami was not a ballet town, and donors were scarce. Still, he got a company going, in 1986, and within a few years--precisely at the time when Balanchine's ballets started looking dry and thin at his home company--we began hearing reports that Villella's troupe, however younger and poorer, was delivering Balanchine with the former dazzle. Eventually, the Miami dancers came north, but they couldn't afford a Manhattan season--as Villella pointed out in a recent interview with Roslyn Sulcas for the Times, it costs a million dollars a week to be produced in a decent-sized theatre in Manhattan--so the company went to Westchester, Long Island, Newark. Not many people got on the bus to go see those shows. Hence M.C.B.'s season last month was an enormous occasion. Not only was the company appearing, at last, in Manhattan; it was coming to City Center, where New York City Ballet was founded, and where Villella started out. It seemed like old times.

Most people don't expect Balanchine's work to look, today, exactly as it did under his supervision. But they want two things: first, that all the steps be there, executed carefully; and, second, that the performance suggest an idea behind the ballet. Other companies, including even the heavily criticized New York City Ballet, have given us the steps much of the time. What was missing was the spirit. For years, the younger dancers at N.Y.C.B. didn't seem to know what the Balanchine ballets were about, or that they were about anything at all, other than the fact that they were made by a famous dead man who founded the company and therefore they had to dance them.

Such cluelessness is what you do not see in Miami City Ballet. Maybe it was good for Villella and his staff to be away from New York, and in a non-ballet town. Maybe this forced them to ask themselves, Why do we like these ballets? Who cares? And perhaps it was ...